So they went on, back and forth. The Gepard’s greatest novelty lay in the fact that it could fire several different types of 9mm round without having to change the barrel. Sasha reeled off eight possibilities, ending with the 9 x 30 hard-alloy-core bullet called the Grom. ‘You know what grom means?’ he asked jokily. ‘It means thunder! Very big impact and penetration. Will pierce body armour at three hundred metres.’

Sasha also sat in on a couple of language classes. When he and Valentina found they came from the same city – the place the Communists had called Gorki, now back to its original name of Nizhni Novgorod – they really hit it off. There was one hilarious session when somebody asked Val for a few swear-words, just to put us in the swim, and she pretended to be greatly shocked.

‘Swear-words?’ she said. ‘In Russia, there are no such things. The Communist system was so pure that after seventy-five years of it, all obscenities were eliminated.’

Her teasing kept everyone in good spirits. Of course there was no question of her joining the team in the field, but as we broke up from one lesson, to butter her up, I said, ‘Val, I wish to hell you were coming with us.’

‘Get me a visa and give me a Gepard,’ she quipped back, ‘and I’ll be there.’

One little task I set the lads was the creation of lapel badges bearing their names in English and Russian. Obviously we didn’t want anything that would flap about, so I told everyone to make up a cream-coloured linen patch, with black writing on it, that could be stitched on the tunic of the Russian DPMs we would be wearing. My own name came out as ZHORDI, Mal was exactly the same – MAL – and Rick was RIK, pronounced as if he stank. Johnny became ZHONNI, Dusty DOSTI, and Pete PYOTR. Even Pavarotti could be easily transliterated. But the one name that knackered everybody was Whinger. His real name was Billy, but he’d been known as Whinger for so long that none of his mates could call him anything else. The trouble was, the Russian alphabet has no W, and the nearest we could get to it was VUINZHA.